


Verteidigungskrieg

by vonquixote (propergoffick)



Category: Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka
Genre: Gen, World War I, Zombies, gratuitous Allo! Allo! references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 20:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13348548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffick/pseuds/vonquixote
Summary: After that business with the Shalka, the Doctor's as-yet-unknown superiors send him, the Master and Alison to Passendale. It's July 1917, and there's something weird going on in no-man's-land.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old fic. I started writing this in 2009 or thenabouts and have never quite been arsed to finish it. I was worried about Being Caught Writing Fanfiction (Everyone Knows That's All Porn) Whilst Being A Teacher, and then fell far enough out of love with Doctor Who that I couldn't bear the thought of revisiting it. 
> 
> Maybe I'll wrap it up someday, with a conclusion in a slightly jarring style, like I'm fandom Cosgrove Hall or something. 
> 
> In any case, I'm not even sure it's any good, but here it is, 95% unedited, only the most cringe of lines adjusted for Modern Times.

"Will one of you please answer that?"  
  
Alison's - companions? landlords? bosses? - had grown on her. She'd learned to tolerate their little eccentricities and failures as functional human-looking beings - the Master's insistence on toast and tea every morning even though he couldn't digest it and inevitably ended up in a compromising position with a very small vacuum cleaner, the way the Doctor was utterly incapable of holding a civilised conversation without at least two glasses of claret inside him, the endless arguments over which of them cheated more horribly at chess. People got like this when they hardly saw anyone but each other and didn't have anyone around to snap them out of it - she'd been there herself with Joe towards the end - but the ringing was starting to annoy her. "What's your problem with answering the 'phone anyway?"  
  
"That is no mere telephone," the Doctor growled, scurrying around the console and glaring past the time rotor at the old-fashioned earpiece-on-a-chain contrivance currently making Alison's life a misery. "It's everything I detest, and nothing but trouble. I've had it up to here with the wretched machine."  
  
"Knock it off, Doctor. It might be good news."  
  
"My dear Miss Cheney, it is _never_ good news." The Master peered over his book and raised an eyebrow with impeccable precision. "The only people besides ourselves who know that number are the Doctor's reluctant superiors. They only ever contact us in moments of dire necessity."  
  
"Then it might be important. I'll answer it."  
  
"No!" The Doctor lunged across the console and grabbed her hand by the wrist before it could reach the earpiece. The 'phone rang off. "They don't know about you yet. It might be safer to keep it that way."  
  
"What are you - look, one of you has got to pick up before I go completely out of my mind."  
  
"Absolutely not!"  
  
"My dear Miss Cheney - "  
  
"Look at it this way, Doctor. You answer it the next time it rings, or else I do."  
  
The Doctor made a decidedly unpatrician face involving the wrinkling of his nose and the squinting of his eyes. It didn't become him. "Lesser of two evils, I suppose. All right."

* * *

While a man of many faults - a pretentious, antisocial borderline alcoholic unable or unwilling to explain himself with any clarity whatsoever, and that was only the beginning - the Doctor was at least capable of maintaining a course once committed to it. When Alison eventually prevailed upon him to do something he invariably manned up, pulled his finger out and got on with a minimum of fuss, and so he did answer the 'phone the next time it rang. For a given value of 'answer', at least.  
  
"Go away. No, I mean it. Can't somebody else... what do you mean? Are you seriously telling me to - don't you remember what happened last time? What do you mean that's why you're doing it? Hello? How dare you!" He tossed the earpiece onto the console and glowered. "Honestly, I sometimes wish I'd never - "  
  
"What would they have us do, then?" That was another thing Alison had just about gotten used to - the way the Master always appeared right behind the Doctor just when he seemed about to actually let something important slip, and interrupt at exactly the right moment.  
  
"We're going to Earth. Again. They've given me co-ordinates."  
  
"What for?" said Alison.  
  
"Salvage." The Doctor scowled. "They've tracked some piece of technology that's apparently playing merry hell with the timeline and they want us to locate it and bring it back."  
  
"So is this what you two do? Scavenger hunt your way round space and time?" Alison tried hard not to laugh. "I was expecting something a bit more dramatic."  
  
"Not always. Sometimes we're expected to protect primitive civilisations from hostile entities who might restrict their development in a terminal fashion. Sound familiar?" The Doctor's hands stalked across the console like irritable spiders, flicking switches and pushing sliders about, and the Master took position on the other side, watching the scanner and occasionally adjusting a dial. "I thought they had other people for this sort of thing."  
  
"If you don't like the job, why don't you just quit?"  
  
"Why didn't you? Before we met, you were working in a pub with exactly one regular customer in a village nobody ever came to. Why?"  
  
"Nothing else to do."  
  
"There you are, then." The time rotor paused in its wheezing for a second, then resumed it, rather more dynamically. "Besides, you never know. It might actually be important. I suggest you change."  
  
"What, to blend seamlessly into my surroundings like you never do?"  
  
"Because it's raining."  
  
"How do you know?"  
  
"That summer," the Doctor sighed, "it never stopped raining."  


* * *

 

 

The TARDIS landed half an hour later - by Alison's watch - and she returned to the console room just as the Doctor was tugging on a rather crinkled set of jackboots.  
  
"I rather suspect we've landed behind the German lines," he said, without looking round, "but that shouldn't be too much of a problem, provided you follow my lead."  
  
"The German lines? Where've we landed?"  
  
"Passendale." The Master tapped the scanner, and Alison hurried over to join him. "Local time four-fifty and twenty-two seconds post meridian, twenty-sixth of July, year nineteen hundred and seventeen."  
  
"The battle you were about to mention started properly in autumn, Alison - right now they're just warming up." The Doctor stood up. "There. Shall we take a look around?"  
  
"What are we looking for?"  
  
"Anything inexplicable and anachronistic."  
  
"Besides you, Doctor?" said the Master under his breath.  
  
"Anything that looks like a spaceship. Or that's not a spaceship but looks like it's a spaceship pretending to be something else. It's crashed and it wasn't very big, apparently, but it's not supposed to be here and it's already started effecting local events."  
  
"It's not dangerous out there, is it?"  
  
"Only if you're English." The Doctor paused, halfway to the door. "And in uniform. Come on."  
  
Regretting the choice of combat trousers slightly, Alison followed him, through the doors and out into a muddy, flat field. The Doctor hadn't been joking about the rain - it was hammering down, so thickly Alison could barely see. There was a vague shadow off in the distance that looked like a hill, and another clinging to the horizon behind the TARDIS - maybe trees. She could hear, though - hear the endless drumming of the rain and the splashes of the huge mud puddles, and something else, over the rain, off in the distance, rolling like regimented thunder. The Doctor fumbled with a long dark umbrella he must have been hiding somewhere behind the TARDIS doors - after a moment, it shot open with a creak, and Alison scurried underneath gratefully.  
  
"Field artillery," the Doctor said in her ear, hunched down to something approximating her height, "targeting the British positions on Messines Ridge, over there. We must be somewhere between the second and third lines."  
  
"So what's the plan if we meet any Germans?"  
  
"I'll lie through my teeth and you'll try not to give me away."  
  
"Sounds reasonable."  
  
"So glad you approve."  
  
Picking their way across the field was slow work - there were puddles of unknown depth and contents, the water looking dark and oily as the rain lashed its surface. The Doctor forged slightly ahead, jackboots prodding at the unstable ground like a military Wenceslas, Alison tagging behind and casting the occasional mutinous look at her watch. After about twenty minutes of painstaking sloppy progress, the vague outlines of buildings and pillboxes started to emerge, and after another five minutes or so they came up hard against a line of barbed wire and a line of wooden stumps indicating the edge of the trench. A voice rang out of the rain as they reached the wire.  
  
" _Halt! Freund oder Fiend?_ "  
  
The Doctor glared at nothing in particular, took the mess of circuits and aerials Alison called 'the TARDIS mobile phone' (in her defence, it looked a bit like a tiny, flattened version of the TARDIS, until it started unfoldng and doing any of its  _other_ jobs) from his pocket and shook it hard.  
  
" _Freund oder Fiend? Antworte mir, oder ich schießen!_ "  
  
"I should probably have asked before, Doctor. Do you actually speak German?"  
  
"Don't you?"  
  
"Nope. I took Spanish."  
  
"Neither of us should have to... damn the thing. _Wir sind bereits Freunde!_ " He slapped the mobile again, and this time it emitted a sort of mechanical squeak. "That's better."  
  
A figure was looming over the line of stumps, murky and indistinct - it wore a domed helmet of dark metal and sodden fatigues of indeterminate colour. "Advance and be recognised!" it called in perfect - heavily accented, but perfect - English, using the business end of its rifle to indicate a path zigzagging through the wire. The Doctor stepped delicately along it, hoiking his cloak above the points, and Alison followed.  
  
"You're civilians."  
  
"In a manner of speaking. I am the Doctor - just 'the Doctor' - and this is my assistant, Miss Alison Cheney. We're - " the Doctor interrupted himself with a cough, " - advisors to the Chiefs of Staff."  
  
"Defectors, are you? Or spies?" The soldier looked the Doctor up and down - for his part, the Doctor kept eye contact, his face unmoving.  
  
"Indeed. We were on our way to Passendale, but our transport got a little turned around in this perpetual bloody rain. You should probably let us through to report, you know. Colonel von Lossberg will be terribly upset if you don't."  
  
The soldier nodded slowly and put up his rifle. "Corporal Eisner, sir."  
  
"There's no need to 'sir' me, I'm not a soldier. Doctor will be perfectly adequate."  
  
"Very well, Doctor. Follow me." Eisner pulled aside the last roll of wire in front of them and stepped aside, allowing them past and down the ladder he'd come up. It led into a narrow trench, shored up with logs and padded with sandbags on both sides - more specifically, it led into a large, deep puddle, which they landed in one after the other with a moist, slurpy splash.  
  
"Lovely."  
  
"Advantage of jackboots, Alison - no lace holes."  
  
Eisner led them up the trench, behind the occasional sentry peering through a tiny gap in the sandbags and the dark, creaking entrances to dug-outs. The occasional head lifted to watch them go by, but most of the entrances were empty, and most of the sentries asleep on their feet. Taking advantage of the Corporal's pulling ahead slightly, Alison tugged on the Doctor's cloak as they worked their way along the winding trench.  
  
"Nice work back there, knowing who their commanding officer was."  
  
"Lucky guess. Lossberg can't have been here long."  
  
"Still pretty impressive, though. Mind you, I'm not sure how I feel about being a defector."  
  
"Treat it as a matter of expediency, and hope." The Doctor jumped another puddle. "You haven't asked about the language barrier."  
  
"I'm guessing the TARDIS mobile's some sort of universal translator."  
  
"Close. It's a mechanical control for one. The TARDIS interprets the local language on your behalf and drops the translation into your head through a telepathic field. It also does the same thing for what you're saying - intercepts the thought and supplies you with the necessary vocabulary."  
  
"So I'm speaking German?"  
  
"Not right now. If you don't want to be understood, you hold down the button I'm holding down now and the field stops working. Very handy for keeping secrets, and one of the Master's better ideas."  
  
"Why am I not surprised?" Alison grinned. "You'd better deactivate it - he's coming back."  
  
"What news, Corporal?"  
  
"Colonel von Lossberg sends his apologies. He is engaged with an important matter behind the lines. A driver is on his way to collect you and take you to Passendale. Until then, you have the pleasures of trench hospitality to look forward to."

* * *

The pleasures of trench hospitality turned out to be a damp, peaty dug-out, with two rickety chairs and a table that looked like splinters held together with old bandages. At least it was warm, and Eisner had courteously allowed them the use of his chairs while he propped himself against the table. Under the helmet, Eisner was quite young - about Alison's age - with sandy hair considerably cleaner than the rest of him.  
  
"Welcome to my humble abode," he said with a smirk. "I would offer you coffee, but there is some trouble with the supply line at present... would you care for sugar in your hot water?" The Doctor scowled, but Alison nodded.  
  
"Thanks. I can't believe you've got to live like this," she said, looking around. "I've seen pictures and had lessons and that, but this is harsh."  
  
"Feel sorry for the British," said Eisner as he hunched over the stove. "These are old positions - theirs are new, and exposed to our artillery. Down here, close to the ridge, we are relatively safe - they have yet to move their guns onto Messines."  
  
"You're winning, then?"  
  
"The British have taken the ridge, but they will come no further. Colonel von Lossberg is a genius. We call him 'the fireman of the front line' - he is posted all over the Western Front, to wherever the need is greatest and the enemy strongest, and always he succeeds in turning them back."  
  
"Defensive warfare," the Doctor intoned - definitely an intonement, with an oddly hollow and funereal sound even for him - "assures stalemate at best, and relies on the predictability of one's enemies rather more than I care to. Which isn't to impugn Colonel von Lossberg any, of course," he added as Eisner spun round to face him, although he didn't so much as change his tone or even look at the Corporal, "merely to say that a lesser strategist who underestimates her opponents has no chance of implementing the doctrine with any sort of success."  
  
"You said 'her' opponents, Doctor. Have the British appointed a lady Chief of Staff?" Eisner smirked again - there was something slightly hollow about it, Alison realised, like he was trying to smile properly but he'd forgotten how. The Doctor cracked a very similar smile.  
  
"Did I? Well, they certainly haven't. I was thinking of another war. But that was long ago, and besides..." He trailed off, staring at the tabletop.  
  
"The wench is dead?" said Alison after a few seconds.  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
"That's how it ends, isn't it?"  
  
"It doesn't have to. Still, I'm sure the Colonel can stay on top of things."  
  
"That is why you are here, Doctor." Eisner carried over a pair of tin mugs, passed one to Alison and sat on the corner of the table with the other in his hand. "Am I right?"  
  
"Truth be told, I'm not quite sure why I'm here. My superiors only told me there was something unusual going on at Passendale that required my," he coughed again, "specialist knowledge."  
  
"You would have to ask the Colonel. There was the business with the hill exploding, of course..."  
  
Alison, blowing across the top of her mug, spluttered and nearly sprayed Eisner and the Doctor. "Exploding hill?"  
  
"Messines Ridge. The British are supposed to have undermined it and blown up our defences, but I saw Sergeant Klein coming back from the retreat and he said it was hours before they attacked - they were as surprised as we were!"  
  
"Should you be telling us this? I mean, we're English. Careless talk costs lives, y'know."  
  
"I like the sound of that. 'Careless talk costs lives'..." Eisner held out a hand and moved it horizontally with each word, rather like he was spelling out a slogan on an imaginary poster - which, of course, he was.  
  
"One for another time, perhaps?" said the Doctor. "And of course he should be telling us. It's interesting. So, the Ridge exploded - then what?"  
  
"Well, after that, Colonel von Lossberg arrived and he always seems to know exactly what the British are going to do - "  
  
"He is a genius." The Doctor winked, enormously and sardonically, and Alison stifled a smile.  
  
"And they always seem to know exactly what we are going to do."  
  
"Well, maybe they have a genius too."  
  
"And then there are the stretcher parties."  
  
"Oh? What about the stretcher parties?"  
  
"They never bring back any dead. Only wounded. Ever since the British took Messines."  
  
"What happens to the dead?" Alison looked across at the Doctor, who raised an eyebrow, as if to say 'good question'.  
  
"Nobody knows. They just disappear."

Alison drained her mug of hot-water-with-sugar-in-it thoughtfully. Eisner sipped at his. The Doctor stared at the tabletop, evidently as lost in thought as Alison was. The sound of footsteps cut through the muffled hammering of the rain, and another soldier appeared at the door.  
  
"Transport for two to Passendale?"

* * *

  
"Thoughts?" the Doctor asked as their car trundled up a rough embankment road away from the third line. Alison looked across at him - she'd been squinting through the rain trying to make out anything but distant trees off to the south - and shrugged.  
  
"You're the expert, mate."  
  
"Alison, this won't do at all. I brought you along because I need someone to play off, you understand? Someone to spur my aging and withered brain into some form of useful activity. Someone to ask the right questions. You were doing rather well with Eisner."  
  
"Okay. You're Holmes, and you want me to be Watson... well, the story always starts with Watson making a guess that turns out to be completely wrong."  
  
"It's as good a start as any."  
  
"Right then. Your whatever-it-is-you're-looking for's supposed to be mucking about with history, so we look for bits of history that are different."  
  
"Haven't seen any. Not so far. The explosion at Messines Ridge is well-documented, although the official history claims it was a ploy by the British - undermining and suchlike devilry. Von Lossberg is here on time, and the battle's a stalemate with a slight advantage to the Germans. Everything appears to be panning out fine."  
  
"What about the body-snatching?"  
  
"That's a possibility, although it raises some unseemly questions about what's here that requires recently deceased bodies. Better. Keep going."  
  
"That's all we've got. I suppose we have to find out what the Colonel's inspecting, see how that ties into it."  
  
" _Wir sind angekommen_ ," said the driver, who'd been trying to ignore the antisocial foreign turncoats.  
  
"Better turn the translator back on as well."

* * *

  
"Doctor. Glad you have been sent to us. I believe you may be able to help us with a problem or two."  
  
Colonel von Lossberg turned out to be an unremarkable sort of man in middle age - large nose, large ears, slightly too small for his trench coat, but otherwise very ordinary. The two batmen who accompanied him seemed to think otherwise - there was a faintly distant, star-crazed look in their eyes that reminded Alison of Joe at a rugby match - that sort of hanging-on-every-moment-'cause-this-could-be-the-memory-of-a-lifetime stare.  
  
"It's what I'm here for. I gather you've been having some supply trouble."  
  
"Among other things, yes. A shipment of the new mustard-agent gas disappeared somewhere in the second strategic line - "  
  
"Good," said Alison, glaring at him.  
  
"You have objections?"  
  
"Chemical warfare's disgusting, Colonel. That stuff ought to be banned."  
  
"Why? It incapacitates rather than kills. Every British soldier sent back from the front line is one less to attack us and threaten German lives, or one less to die in the act of resisting our own attacks. Far less disgusting than squandering lives in futile assaults on defended positions, do you not agree?"  
  
"It's still a horrible thing to do to someone."  
  
The Doctor stepped between them. "Better a swift death than a slow one? Maybe. That's neither here nor there though. What matters is it's been stolen, and - what else was there, Colonel??"  
  
"Missing men, Doctor. Men killed in raids or on observation detail. The wounded are recovered and confirm their late comrades as dead, but the burial parties find no bodies."  
  
"Interesting. I'd like to speak with these wounded men, Colonel, if any of them are still about."  
  
"It can be arranged. Although - "  
  
"Although?"  
  
"Although it is nearly six o'clock, Doctor, and I have gone without lunch. Would you and your assistant care to join me for dinner at the town hall?"  
  
Alison smiled sweetly. "I'd rather - "  
  
"Go and have a chat with the wounded men. Excellent suggestion, Alison, I knew I kept you around for a reason. Excuse us a moment, Colonel." The Doctor rounded on her, clasped her hand in his and shook it hard. There was something metallic between them, something pointy that rather hurt to have jammed into one's palm. The Doctor leant in closer to her. "Take this, go to the field hospital and talk to everyone who might know anything about those bodies. I'll catch you up later."  
  
"While you go for drinkypoos indoors, in the warm, with the nice war criminal?"  
  
"I'm not exactly looking forward to it either, but I want him on our side, and I want to know more about this missing gas. You follow up the body-snatching."  
  
"You think it's connected, don't you?"  
  
"Let's just say I'm not about to eliminate any possibilities." The Doctor smiled thinly. "Oh, and you can keep the umbrella."  
  
"You're too kind."

* * *

  
Passendale was a small place - smaller than Alison had been expecting, although she'd known it wasn't exactly worth fighting over for its own sake. One long main street, crossing a lane which curved around a tiny, dark church in a long U that disappeared off into the rain to the south, with another road running off to the north. Small, run-down barns, little stone houses, four or five shops across the road from the church (all shut, lights out and windows barred) - nothing that seemed worth fighting over at all. Alison shook her head, trying to make sense of it as she trudged up the main street to a large whitwashed building that looked vaguely promising.  
  
Of course, it was under guard. Nothing could ever be easy, could it? Still, walking in like you owned the place always seemed to work for the Doctor - how did he do it again?  
  
"Hello there," Alison said brightly, beaming and walking up to the uniformed figure huddled under the building's porch. "I'm Alison Cheney, sorry about being English, and working for the Chiefs of Staff." The guard looked ahead stolidly. "Special advisor. Here to see the patients." The guard continued looking ahead stolidly. "This is the field hospital, right?"  
  
"If you were working with the Chiefs of Staff and sent to the field hospital, you would have been told where to find it." The guard looked her up and down with one eye, the one that didn't have its brow raised in a silent yeah-right-pull-the-other-one arch. "And you are out of uniform."  
  
"I'm a civilian. No uniform."  
  
"Civilians are not allowed in the field hospital without a pass."  
  
"Look, if you go up to the Town Hall and ask Colonel von Lossberg - "  
  
"I have standing orders to remain at my post - and to arrest anyone trying to enter the field hospital without a pass."  
  
"Why does he never have to put up with this sort of thing?" Alison rolled her eyes.  
  
"Please return to your home, miss, or I will be forced to arrest you."  
  
"All right, I'm going. Look." Alison stepped back from the porch. "See? Walking away."  
  
She turned and headed down the path, muttering "bloody Doctor makes it look so easy" under her breath, but stopped short halfway down as she heard a door opening. Turning fast, she saw a man in a white apron and shirt-sleeves standing in the doorway, framed by a muted, smoky light still brighter than anything on the street.  
  
"Can you help me with something, please?" he was saying to the guard, whose looking-ahead-stolidly performance was well into its second act.  
  
"I cannot leave my post under any circumstances, Doctor Shichtman. I am sorry."  
  
"For the love of God, I just need an extra pair of hands! My damned nurse has disappeared again and the local aides have both gone home for the night."  
  
"I'll do it," said Alison, stepping forward and putting on her most trustworthy face. "That's if Private von Having-Orders here decides to let me in."  
  
"Civilians are not - "  
  
"Private, I need someone's help. I will watch her, and if the Colonel decides to raise any objections you are welcome to blame me. Miss, come inside, please."  
  
Alison scampered indoors, giving the guard a dirty look as she passed out of his fixed-forward line of sight, and deliberately shaking out her umbrella over his trousers. It folded with a horrible screech and a clatter - like everything the Doctor owned, it seemed to be in a general state of disrepair, held together mainly by rust and bloody-mindedness. Shichtman took it and her jacket from her, placed them on a stand inside the door and led her along the hall.  
  
"Thanks. Alison Cheney. I seem to be working for the Chiefs of Staff."  
  
"Doctor Hans Shichtman. I understand. I only joined up because my wife would not hear of her husband staying behind in Osnabrück. You are English?"  
  
"It's the accent, right?"  
  
"It is what you called the guard." Shichtman smiled wanly. "You are not to worry. I could care less where you were born - you are here and you volunteered your help, and that is enough for me."  
  
"What do you need me to do?"  
  
"I have a patient who needs subduing. He responds well to phenobarbital injections, but I cannot go near him without him lashing out - I just need someone to hold him down while I inject him."  
  
"Is he dangerous?"  
  
"See for yourself." Shichtman unlocked a door and ushered Alison through. The room on the other side was a small ward - actually, Alison realised, it was a former classroom, tables exchanged for beds and the blackboard taken up with a list of names and tally marks beside them. Most of the beds were occupied by men, and most of the men were sitting up and watching or backed up against the walls, eyes fixed on the one nearest the door on Alison's right. His back was arched, his eyes were bulging, and his fingers clutched at his bedsheets. Shichtman had the injection prepared on a tray by the door, and took up a syringe in one hand and a cloth in the other. "I will go for him - when he hits me, grab his hands."  
  
Shichtman stepped forward, and the man on the bed did indeed lash out - at the first sight of the syringe he lunged for Shichtman's hands, eyes white with fear. Shichtman leapt back and Alison caught the patient's right wrist, and that was about that for the plan. The patient yanked his arm back and all but threw Alison over the bed - she rolled with it, thanking anyone who was listening for two years of after-school aikido, and grappled with him for the other arm.  
  
"Bloody hell, he's strong!"  
  
"Hold his hands!"  
  
"I'm trying!" Alison hauled up one hawser-tight wrist and jammed it into the crook of her own arm, and twisted the other over for Shictman to inject. The patient underneath her gave forth a long, guttural scream, but he relaxed slowly, and after a minute or two Alison felt able to release his hands.  
  
"What happened to him, then?" Alison asked later, sitting in Shichtman's office - what had been the headmaster's - and polishing off the remains of the cold chicken the doctor had offered to split with her.  
  
"I am not sure. He was brought in last week after a raid. During the day, he is fine - he sleeps mostly, occasionally wakes up and converses with other patients - a conventional recovering battle fatigue case. At night, though, the trouble begins - if he is not asleep by nightfall, he will not sleep at all. Occasionally he has seizures. Always he lashes out at myself or my nurse whenever we go near him - he is terrified of doctors, for some reason. I suspect his mind is scarring over some terrible memory, but I, well, I am no psycho-analyst."  
  
"I bet the Doctor could help."  
  
"Who?" Shichman looked up from his dinner with interest, but his gaze snapped off Alison as he heard footsteps outside. "Excuse me."  
  
Crossing to the door, Shichtman threw it back into the path of a statuesque blonde woman in nurses' blues, whose expression of guilt settled on her face with remarkable but not-quite-perfect speed. "And where have you been, Nurse Braut?"  
  
"I was engaged on vital work, doctor. My apologies."  
  
"That is a what, nurse, not a where."  
  
"In discussion with the soldiers making up the stretcher parties from yesterday afternoon. They brought in a man who had been moved improperly and worsened his injuries. He died before he arrived here."  
  
"Hm. I would prefer it if you would ask me for permission next time you feel compelled to educate people, and perhaps to do so during the day when our aides are here to do the work you leave behind?"  
  
The nurse regarded him coldly. "I apologise, doctor. It should not be necessary again."  
  
"Quite." Shichtman seemed disconcerted, but rallied quickly. "Now, Private Däner has had another attack in your absence, but fortunately apart from that it has been quiet. I shall attend to my guest - Miss Cheney, Nurse Braut - and then I am going to bed. Wake me if there is any trouble, or at six if there is none."  
  
"As you wish, doctor. Goodnight, Miss Cheney." Nurse Braut nodded to Alison and continued on her way - Shichtman shut the door and turned back to Alison with a sigh.  
  
"A gifted nurse, but she has the bedside manner of a vulture - and this is not the first time she has been found wanting. I think she is seeing someone in the garrison."  
  
"Lucky him." Alison waggled her eyebrows. "Anyway. The Doctor. He's - " she struggled for the right word, and gave up - "the other Englishman in Passendale. He's having dinner with the Colonel and probably off his face by now - but he's a genius when he's sober. I bet he could help you out with your Private Däner."  
  
"I should like to meet this Doctor of yours."  
  
"I'm going by the town hall to meet him later - I'll bring him back if you like."  
  
"Miss Cheney, I will not have you wandering around Passendale in the dark and the rain. Room three-b is currently empty - you may take a bed there and go to meet your Doctor in the morning."  
  
Nurse Braut, standing flat against the wall with her ear pressed to the doorframe, left them to their pleasant little oh-no-I-couldn't-possibilies with some distaste.

She had a lot to do before the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing Alison noticed on the twenty-seventh of July, nineteen hundred and seventeen, was how much busier Passendale was in daylight. It was still raining, of course, but it was lighter rain than the deluge of last night, and she could see the ranks of marching German soldiery and the slightly frantic way the runners crossed their path or diverted them with a quick word to the officer in charge - and it was definitely frantic. Alison could read crowds - barmaid's trick - and she detected something urgent and panicky about the way the Germans were moving.  
  
The second thing Alison noticed was that the TARDIS mobile 'phone was glowing. She picked it up, inspected the screen with slightly bleary eyes, and felt the strange arcs and curves and intersecting circles on the screen resolve themselves into a recognisable meaning as the 'phone did its damned-if-she-knew-how-it-did-it thing and made itself comprehensible for a befuddled first-thing-in-the-morning human.  
  
 _[You have one missed call.]_  
  
Alison tapped the screen and held the 'phone up to her ear in the customary fashion.  
  
"Hello?"  
  
"Ahh, Miss Cheney," the Master purred. "Terribly sorry to disturb you. I was just calling on the off-chance that some horrific accident had befallen yourself and the Doctor and thus provided a reason for your continued absence."  
  
"Huh? Oh, sorry - stopping out - yeah, the Doctor was invited for drinks with the Colonel - " she paused and grinned at the Master's muffled sigh - "and I crashed at the field hospital. Which was about as much fun as it sounds."  
  
"Well, I'm glad some of us are enjoying themselves. Unfortunately, it falls to me as ever to be the bearer of bad tidings and request that you find the Doctor. Right now."  
  
"What's the rush?"  
  
The Master told her.

* * *

Alison high-tailed it down the main street of Passendale far faster than she'd thought herself capable of at such times in the morning, dodging around the messengers and most of the street fittings, back down the long main road to the U-bend of a square and the town hall.

She barged past the sentries with a "so sorry with the Doctor here to see the Colonel really urgent sorry" and no pauses, and tried three doors before eventually stumbling into the right meeting room.

The Doctor was curled up in a chair, displaying all evidence of a crippling hangover in waiting, from the askew tie to the even-more-drained-than-usual facial expression by way of the eyes rolled back into his skull and the way someone had tucked his cloak around him like a blanket. Von Lossberg was nowhere to be seen.  
  
"Doctor!"  
  
" _...arghsmufflegeroff_ yes?" The Doctor blinked at her. "Alison! Morning?"  
  
"Yes, it is, and do you know what's happened?"  
  
"No. I don't. Is it important?" He blinked again and tried to sit up, winced, evidently thought the better of it and lapsed back into his seat.  
  
"An entire division of German soldiers disappeared from the Yser canal overnight, and the British have just walked right in and taken it!"  
  
"What?" The Doctor lurched upright, in a single movement that would have been rather more dramatic if he hadn't gotten tangled up in his cloak and nearly fallen over. Alison caught him, disentangled the cloak and sat him back down again, carrying on at speed lest he notice her taking care of him and react poorly.  
  
"That's what I said. The Master rang and said he'd known there was something special about today but he'd only just remembered what."  
  
"Poppycock. He's connected to the TARDIS databank; he can't 'forget' anything she knows. I should have realised, though..."  
  
"Yeah, but, the thing is, you're not connected to anyone's databanks," Alison said brightly, determined to head off the Doctor's self-loathing at the proverbial pass, "and you can't be expected to remember some obscure bit of World War One just off the top of your head."  
  
"Can't I?" The Doctor looked nonplussed, which made a change from supercilious and hung-over, and seemed to deflate slightly. "I suppose that's why we have databanks."  
  
"There you go, then. So. Missing troops."  
  
"I don't see why I should be expected to know anything about it. It's certainly historical fact that they disappeared... did the Master mention any sort of anomalies?"  
  
"Nope. Just disappearing troops. You don't think they might've deserted?"  
  
"Possible but unlikely. Where would you hide an entire division?"  
  
"You could divvy them up a bit."  
  
The Doctor gave a hollow little laugh. "Does Von Lossberg know?"  
  


* * *

  
Von Lossberg, it transpired, did know, and had upped and left for an observation post on the new front line as soon as he'd heard. Alison and the Doctor adopted a slightly more leisurely pace, rendered necessary by the need to siphon tea into the Doctor until he was capable of functioning like the higher life form he occasionally claimed to be.

At least he hadn't demanded a fry-up, and he'd waved away the aspirin Alison offered him with a muttered "good heavens woman, are you trying to kill me?" like the ingrate he most certainly was. Eventually he'd pulled himself together enough to stagger downstairs and demand a car to St. Jouen on the second line, and they'd squelched their way along crowded trenches from there.

The rain was thinning out, but Alison was still grateful for the Doctor's umbrella. He lurched ahead of her, the drizzle flattening his hair, running down his cloak and into the mud at their feet. It seemed to be doing him some good, though - by the time they began picking their way uphill toward the new command post, he'd begun taking an interest in his surroundings again, or at least stopped glowering at any soldier unfortunate enough to catch his eye. Alison flapped up after him and caught him by the cloak.  
  
"You didn't ask how the trip to the field hospital went."  
  
"You're right, I didn't. How vulgar of me. How did the trip to the field hospital go?"  
  
"Not sure I'm gonna tell you now."  
  
"It might be important."  
  
"Well, as long as you weren't just trying to get rid of me so you could get plastered with a poisoner..."  
  
"It's remarks like that that forced my hand, Alison. We can't have you going around upsetting the Colonel. He could very easily have us both shot, and I'd rather that didn't happen." The Doctor squinted, looking rather surprised at his own words, frowned, and carried on. "Besides, in his own mind he's right. Anything that might end all this quickly and leave the British worse off.  _And_  they'll only go and mix up their own once they've worked out the trick of it."  
  
"All right, you've made your point. Six on one and half a dozen on the other, right thing for the times and all that. Doesn't mean I have to like it."  
  
"Let's talk about something else, eh?" The Doctor smirked. "Field hospitals."  
  
"They've a patient there with bad shell shock - something weird. He's fine during the day but he goes bananas at night, he's terrified of doctors but fine with soldiers, and he's strong as hell. Lot stronger than he should be. The doctor there - Shichtman, you'd like him - can't work out what's wrong with him."  
  
"It does sound peculiar... almost like he wasn't traumatised by the fighting at all. Does he have any injuries?"  
  
"None that I saw."  
  
"Curiouser and curiouser."  
  
They crested the hill and stepped into a long excavation running across the trench, one end sporting a brace of machine guns and the other a covered observation post with a small table and a little stove. Von Lossberg was standing by the gunners, eyes pressed to his binoculars and his binoculars to a small gap between the sandbags presumably left for that very purpose. The soldiers around him were looking very pointedly at their feet or at their guns or at the fascinating seams of the sandbags or anywhere but at the Fireman of the Front Line, who didn't look like he was having the best time with this particular conflagration.  
  
"Good morning, Colonel," said Alison, trying not to sound too cheerful at the sight of him.  
  
"Why the hell did you not warn me?" Von Lossberg spun around and scowled at the Doctor, who raised his eyebrows and looked blearily at the fuming Colonel.  
  
"My dear Colonel, I was as surprised as you."  
  
"Not about the troops, about the British! The offensive that took Yser did so shortly after dawn - there is no way they could have known what had happened. The offensive must have been planned for today anyway, and the absence of my men pure serendipity. Why do the Chiefs pay spies if the spies do not warn us about this sort of thing?"  
  
The Doctor's expression had been steadily degrading as Von Lossberg spoke, his eyes narrowing and his lips tightening. Alison wasn't sure if he was going to explode or just fall over: in the end he did neither, drawing air in across his teeth like a plumber about to present a particularly unpleasant bill.  
  
"For the record, Colonel, I am a scientist and an investigator, not a spy, and find myself hard pressed to be much of anything within hours of my arrival. Now that I'm here I am determined to do something useful, and I will do if I'm just allowed to - yes, Alison, what is it?"  
  
"There's a noise coming from your pocket. Is that normal?" Alison pointed at approximately the right place - just beneath the Doctor's ribcage. "Sort of a dinging."  
  
The Doctor plunged a hand into his pocket and withdrew what looked remarkably like a bandage stuck onto a couple of pipe cleaners and wedged into the top of an electric doorbell box, held together with wires and a cluster of small LEDs of various fluorescence. The contrivance was emitting a steady, flat chime, which picked up in both pace and volume when it reached the open air. Von Lossberg and Alison regarded it with almost equal disdain as the Doctor held it aloft and twisted the pipe cleaners about, squinting at some sort of dial on the bottom - a cheap Boy Scout's compass held onto the box with gaffer tape.  
  
"Go on then, surprise me," said Alison. "What is it?"  
  
"It's a gas detector."  
  
"And that ringing sound means?" asked Von Lossberg, eyebrows creeping upwards in perturbation.  
  
"It's detected some gas."  
  
The dugout erupted. The more prepared scrabbled at their helmets and pulled on masks - the less bolted for their dugouts, hands clutched protectively over faces. Von Lossberg and the Doctor stood and glared, not at one another but at the panic around them, and Alison, who'd instinctively ducked and clasped a hand over her face, looked up at them incredulously.  
  
"Firstly, young lady," said Von Lossberg, "there have been no shells fired - no means of delivering the gas to us."  
  
"Secondly," the Doctor added, "the detector is far, far more sensitive than the human nose; it's picked up a minute trace. Thirdly, that yellow light means mustard gas, which the British haven't even invented yet - which is peculiar indeed considering, fourthly, the westerly wind."  
  
"So we're probably not going to die then." Alison stood up, feeling rather ashamed of herself.  
  
"Not yet," said the Doctor, with the ghost of a smirk about his features as he returned his attention to the detector.  
  
"That goes for the rest of you!" Von Lossberg called out. "Back to your posts - false alarm! Those of you in dugouts keep masks on you at all times!"  
  
"Didn't you say you'd lost some mustard gas?" Alison asked him as she dusted herself down.  
  
"We have been testing the gas for the last seven weeks - the supply for this week went missing during the convoy's last stop in Passendale." Von Lossberg sighed. "I have had the reserves and the resting troops searching, but so far there have been no signs. Do you think - ?"  
  
"I don't think," the Doctor said, "not yet. Either my detector's playing up or there's something odd about this gas. I should probably take this back to our - " he paused, scrabbling for the word, " - base of operations for testing. Maybe visit your shellshocked private... Alison, could you pop back to Passendale and let Doctor Shichtman know I'm coming?"  
  
"Can't I come back to the - " Alison spotted the Doctor's raised eyebrow just in time " - base with you? My trousers are going crunchy."  
  
"This is the front line, Miss Cheney," said Von Lossberg, looking up from his maps and restraining a sneer. "We all have to endure these little inconveniences. Also I could use you. If you are on your way to the field hospital you could join up with the stretcher party at St. Jouen. They are one member short - something about a nurse not reporting for duty."  
  
"Nurse Braut?"  
  
"I did not ask. Is it important?"  
  
"Maybe. She was skiving last night as well."  
  
"Well, take it up with Doctor Shichtman. I need my wounded men moved back as soon as possible and I cannot always be making allowances for civilian personnel."  
  
"Right you are,  _mein Colonel_." Alison threw him a salute as he looked down again.  
  
"Alison!" the Doctor hissed, but he was smiling as he did so and Alison guessed she'd at least amused somebody besides herself. "Come on. Back the way we came. Work to do and all that."  
  
"Can you at least bring me a change of clothes?"  
  
"I'll see what I can do."

* * *

  
Thirteen miles down the line and two rainy hours later, Corporal Eisner was fresh from his breakfast of stodge and mustard and coming on watch when the British whatever-he-was from the day before came storming down the trench looking soaked, sore and thoroughly absorbed in dark, murky thoughts of his own. He looked up at Eisner, looked around himself, muttered "frightful weather we're having, Corporal, don't you agree?" and proceeded to scramble up the western side of the trench.  
  
"Doctor? What the devil are you doing?"  
  
"Going indoors for a change of trousers," the probably-a-spy-no-matter-what-he-claimed said hollowly.  
  
"Indoors? Out there? But the British! They have been moving guns onto Messines all morning!"  
  
"Oh, they'll be knocking off for elevenses," said the Doctor, hauling himself up the sandbags. "You're probably safe 'til noon."

* * *

  
The Master looked up from his book - he'd very pointedly skipped Owen, Sassoon and Faulks and selected  _His Last Bow_ , appropriate only by extension - and chuckled at what sounded like a small, bad-tempered waterfall coming from the general direction of the TARDIS door.  
  
"You know," he said, curling further into his armchair and away from the Doctor's puddle, "there are times when I am grateful for the confinement you have seen fit to place upon me."  
  
"Before you proceed further down this conversational avenue," the Doctor said, picking up a teatowel from the coffee table and mopping his brow with it, "consider that I never saw fit to waterproof you, and thence the terrible fate likely to befall you if you continue rubbing my nose in it."  
  
"Point taken," the Master said, looking up. "Would you like a towel?"  
  
"I'll deal with that. You put your mind to this - " the Doctor tossed the gas detector onto the table as he spoke - "and I'd appreciate it if you don't go conveniently forgetting established historical fact available from even the most primitive information networks this time."  
  
"I am only what my creator has made me, Doctor, and cannot be held accountable for the inadequacies of my hardware." The Master looked down at the detector. "Sulphur dicholoride and ethylene. Mustard gas. If your instrument couldn't work that out, I shudder to contemplate the implications for your other accomplishments. Should I prepare for my legs to fall off?"  
  
"It worked that part out fine," said the Doctor, flinging his cloak over a rail by the console. "Take a closer look, though. There's some highly complex agent in there. Silicon-based, but that's all I can say."  
  
"Fascinating." The Master picked up his book again. "Would you perhaps like me to do some sums for your entertainment when I'm finished there?"  
  
The Doctor had already slithered away, towel-bound. The Master counted to twenty, turned the page, tried to read on, and finally picked up the Doctor's ghastly instrument with a scowl.

* * *

  
  
He was still glaring at the thing when the Doctor resurfaced in a clean waistcoat, shirt and trews, carrying a Gladstone bag under one arm, and didn't quite manage to put it down in time to avoid being caught.  
  
"Well?"  
  
"Well, I'm amazed this thing can recognise oxygen, never mind mustard gas, but it and you appear to be essentially correct. Is this really a doorbell?"  
  
"Never mind that now. What have you found?"  
  
"Your suspicions concerning silicate compounds are entirely sound. There's a solid substance suspending itself in the gas. It might be something nanotechnological."  
  
"Any idea what it does?"  
  
"The best I can do right now is 'probably quite a lot'. It's a complex structure; I'll need time."  
  
"Try not to take too long. I think this stuff's been released over the German lines."  
  
"Friendly fire?" asked the Master, raising an eyebrow. "On the subject of which, you may wish to check the scanner before you leave. There appears to be some sort of disturbance outside."  
  
The Doctor strode around the console and pulled down the scanner screen on its column - it flickered into blue and white life, and then into colour, just in time to display a vivid splash of brown smoke and browner mud.  
  
"Good heavens. Do you think those are British shells?"  
  
"I hardly think their nationality relevant. They'll be just as fatal, no matter which group of trained apes was responsible for hurling them at you."  
  
"You can't expect me to sit in here doing nothing now that I've started to take an interest in affairs, can you?"  
  
"Hardly." The Master cracked a narrow smile. "Don't these people have a saying concerning idle hands?"  
  
The Doctor sighed.

* * *

  
Doctor Shichtman looked up from what was laughably called his dispensing table - it was the teacher's desk in what had been the school's archaic excuse for a laboratory - and rubbed his eyes. The room was darker than it had been when he'd sat down, and his eyes widened as he caught sight of his watch.  
  
"Ten? Great God! I must have..."  
  
The excuse died on his lips as he realised what that meant. Ten o'clock - and Private Daner required sedation at eight. Doctor Shichtman leapt to his feet and made for the door, kicking over papers and waste-paper-bins and goodness knew what else in his haste. He bolted down the corridor, coat flapping behind him, and scrabbled frantically at the doorhandle.  
  
He stopped, aghast, at the sight of Private Daner, fast asleep in bed. Most of the other men had joined him - two of them were playing cards, and chatting with a stranger in a long green cloak who had a large leather travelling bag by his feet. He turned around as Shichtman entered - he had a long, thin face, with pale grey eyes and a haughty, slightly distant expression.  
  
"Doctor Shichtman, I presume? He's fine. Hypnotised. Hope you don't mind my not asking - I didn't have the heart to wake you. I'm the Doctor. Fascinating case, isn't he?"  
  
"Is he not?" Shichtman shook his head. "We should probably not discuss him in front of the - oh goodness, have you men eaten?"  
  
"The sky does not fall in without you to watch it, Doctor Shichtman," said one of the soldiers, looking up from his cards and smiling. "Nurse Braut came round at five-thirty with the rations."  
  
"Oh yes. Of course she did. I remember she brought me my coffee, and then - tell me, is she still here?"  
  
"No. She left at seven. Something about shelling down by Messines."  
  
"I can vouch for that," the Doctor glowered. "I've been hiding from that racket all day. Could have been here hours ago if not for that."  
  
"Hours ago..." Shichtman swayed a little. "Nurse Braut brought me my coffee at five, and then..."  
  
"Something wrong, Doctor?" The Doctor strode over to Shichtman and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You look exhausted."  
  
"I shouldn't be. I think I may have been asleep for five hours."  
  
"On a cup of coffee? That Braut woman must not be able to brew to save her life. You do look exhausted, though..." The Doctor turned Shichtman around and steered him out of the ward. "I think another coffee is in order, don't you?"

* * *

  
Coffee brewed and paperwork cleared from the second chair, the two men sat down in the laboratory, facing each other over the "dispensing table".  
  
"Now. Private Daner. What do you make of him?" Shichtman had a pencil poised over his note-paper, and an eager look on his face.  
  
"Well, it's not shell shock in the sense that it's currently understood, although there's definitely trauma there. He's terrified of doctors, hospitals, the whole apparatus of medicine, but only at night - there's some connection between those two things and it takes both of them to induce an attack. The peculiar thing is he has no fear of the battlefield, none whatsoever..."  
  
"Have you spoken with him?"  
  
"Mmm? Oh, yes... in a manner of speaking." The Doctor coughed. "What happened when he was brought in? Anything unusual?"  
  
"He was one of the last we found. Evacuating Messines was difficult; five days between the explosion and the end of the fighting, you know?"  
  
"Can you be any more precise?"  
  
"You have seen what I have to work with, Doctor - absentee nurses, most of my staff being called and recalled to the front lines. Battle fatigue cases are not considered important - my job is to treat their wounds and watch over them until they can be sent home."  
  
"Mmm. Terrible business... wait. Absentee nurses? Alison told me to ask after a missing nurse - actually, have you seen Alison this afternoon? She was supposed to be filling in at St. Jouen."  
  
"I last saw her at... let me see... four? Maybe four-thirty? She cannot have been back since then - I would have been woken if another party had come in."  
  
"Doctor Shichtman, it's ten o'clock. Where's she been for the last five hours?"

* * *

  
Alison had run out of ways to think how tired she was. She'd hit 'exhausted' at speed, passed through 'knackered' shortly after that, and now her legs and arms ached so much that they didn't really feel like limbs - just lumps of pain that were attached to her where her legs and arms had been. She'd stopped counting how many runs along the trench line they'd done, and how many times she'd jogged up or down the streets of Passendale with a stretcher, empty or full, covered or not. She'd asked after the Doctor at first, but without luck. She'd tried to 'phone him, sneaking away from the canteen in Passendale's church hall and missing half her late lunch, but its counterpart in the TARDIS hadn't even rung. It had cut straight to an answerphone greeting which struck Alison as a calculated wind-up. Explained why his bosses where always so pissed off with him, anyway. Resolving to give him the hiding of a lifetime when he either picked up or showed up, she'd gone back in to scrounge what she could before the back-and-forth-with-stretchers trudgery started over again.   
  
Another meal - another futile attempt to reach the Doctor - and back to the field hospital at six, where the godawful Braut woman had been waiting for them instead of Shichtman. She didn't look much better in daylight. Not bad looking, if your type basically amounted to 'Valkyrie' and you had a thing for women in uniform, but there didn't seem to be anything behind those blue eyes but ice. She'd glared at Alison once, when the party had arrived, and then turned her stare onto the soldiers.  
  
"What is this girl doing here?" said Braut to the party's leader, a lance-corporal who'd introduced himself by a nickname the TARDIS mobile translated as " _Calcate_ ". The whole party had nicknames - they'd been pointed out to Alison in a ring and she'd not had a chance to attach the names to muddy faces before they'd been off on the first run.  
  
"She came down this morning. Said she was filling in for you."  
  
"Then she can continue doing so."  
  
"Hang about," said Alison, setting down her stretcher and glowering up at the glacial face of Mount Braut. "I'm supposed to be meeting someone in Passendale and you're here now, right?"  
  
"I am fulfilling the responsibilities of Doctor Shichtman, who is currently..." and here she paused, her eyes flickering over everything except Alison, "indisposed."  
  
"Oh yeah? What've you done to him?"  
  
"I have done nothing!" Braut hissed, her eyes flashing. "The doctor is resting. He is being worked to exhaustion, young lady."  
  
"So am I, and I'm not even supposed to  _be_  here, and..."  
  
"None of us are  _supposed_  to be here. This..." Braut's face twitched; she seemed to be searching for the words, "military unpleasantness has consumed us all. We continue working, despite. An end will be put to it eventually."  
  
Alison's pocket was twitching. The TARDIS mobile was buzzing - not the long, regular buzzes of its ringing, but a spasmodic, irregular twitch. She slapped her hand onto her pocket, instinctively, desperately thinking shut up shut up shut up - and, thank God, it stopped. Braut's gaze flicked onto Alison for a moment, but then snapped away onto the lance-corporal again.  
  
"The positions under the Messines Ridge have been taking fire all day, easing off in the last hour. I have orders to send you there and recover the wounded."  
  
"Understood." Calcate - whatever that was supposed to mean - turned to the party. "You heard the nurse. Messines Ridge, at the double."  
  
"Sod that." Alison put down her end of her stretcher and attempted to stand up straight, against the better judgment of her complaining back. "I'm a civilian, mate. You're not sending me into the line of fire."  
  
"If you are a civilian," Braut said pointedly, "then you have a choice between evacuation or performing useful support duties. Choose."  
 _  
Can't let her evacuate me. I'll never find the bloody Doctor then._  Alison picked up the stretcher. "Fine. Least you could do is give me a tin hat."

* * *

  
The run out to Messines was different. Staggered, for one thing, a rush from dugout to dugout, alcove to alcove. As they closed on the front line, the 'easing off' proved itself to be something of a false hope. Shells howled and burst overhead, soaring out of the omnipresent clouds and coming down on and around and behind the little stretcher party. The first few had made Alison practically jump out of her skin - it was one thing to hear them off in the distance, and quite another to see them burst in fire and smoke and waves of force.  
  
"You get used to them," said the chap holding the other end of her stretcher - Hahn, she thought, vaguely remembering that nickname and that nose going together. "Of course, that is where the real danger lies. You become complacent - "  
  
"Tempting fate a bit there, aren't you?" Alison had to raise her voice as they jogged toward the front line, raise it over the high, keening whistle of incoming shells.  
  
"I am not sure I believe in - get down!"  
  
It came down at the head of the party, sending up a plume of smoke and dirt and fire. Calcate hurtled backwards, a twisted, broken doll, and struck the side of the trench with a wet thud. Hahn threw up his hands and toppled backwards, roaring with pain and shock. Alison spun, instinctively, away from the heat and the light, dropping the stretcher, stumbling, falling, ears ringing. As she scrambled along the slick, stagnant floor of the trench, another shell came screaming down on the second line, back the way they'd come. Alison hauled herself up against the wall of the trench, shut her eyes, and prayed.


	3. Chapter 3

They came out of the rain, a matter of minutes after the shelling had stopped, marching in double file along the German trenches, hardly slowing as they clambered over the rubble where the trench walls had given in. Each man's eyes were fixed ahead: no-one looked around or back. The leader's head swung down as they came to a junction, and scanned the bodies that lay scattered amongst the mud and wood and ruin. His men came to a silent, perfect halt behind him, still staring ahead. No order was given, no word exchanged, but the soldiers fell out nevertheless, pulling the fallen out from puddles and piles, laying the bodies on the stretchers they'd been carrying toward the front, scrabbling bare-handed through the rubble.  
  
Alison opened her eyes one at a time, peering about the alcove where she'd been flung by the blast. There was a beam scant inches from her face, and the earth was packed in close about her, overwhelmingly dark and cold and smoky-stinking, her ears ached and her whole right-hand side hurt like hell on Earth - _but let's face it_ , she thought, _it could have been a whole lot worse_. Best of all, it sounded like there were people outside. She could hear distant footsteps, and a faint sort of scrabbling, digging kind of noise.  
  
"Hey! Is anybody out there?" No reply was forthcoming. "Anybody? You've got a woman down in here!"  
  
Someone had evidently heard her. The scrabbling had intensified, quite close to her ear. A clod of earth dislodged itself and rolled down her sore side, and then there was a rush of cold, wet air and dull grey light, spilling over her face and making her eyes water.  
  
"Thanks, mate," she said, turning her head to get a better look at her rescuer, and then "bloody hell!" when she actually got her eyes to focus on him.  
  
Her saviour looked tired and drained, lips thin and set tight, his eyes dull and slightly glazed. That wasn't too weird. She'd seen a lot of expressions like that since arriving in Passchendale - dead inside, like the person had simply given up thinking about where they were or what they were doing or anything at all. It wasn't an expression she'd have chosen to see on someone who was saving her life, but it wasn't the problem.  
  
The problem was his face. It was puffy, and waxen, and a dull orange colour, like a grubby pumpkin. His eyes were so inflamed it was a wonder he could see, and his lips were thick and bloated. Trickles of dried blood ran from his nostrils, and he wheezed when he breathed, which wasn't often. His hands tugged at the earth around Alison - he was strong, but he was clumsy, his fingers slow and awkward. It came away in great chunks, peeling off her skin and dropping to the floor with soggy, sullen thuds. Alison tried to move her arm - half to help, half to keep him at a distance - but the rush of heat and pinpoint pain from somewhere just above her wrist convinced her otherwise very quickly, and she clutched her arm to her and waited, concentrating hard on biting down the tears and not looking.  
  
She stumbled as he pulled the thick mud from around her feet, and fell into the trench, on the elbow of her bad arm. Even braced for it, even twisting so as not to land on the hand, it sent another flame up her bones and fingers, and brought another obscuring wave of tears to her eyes. Mopping at them with her good hand, Alison rolled over and looked along the trench, trying to find something to focus on.  
  
There were about two dozen soldiers, all moving with the same deliberate muscle-by-muscle precision as the one who'd dug her out, all with that bloated fungal orangeness about them. Several were carrying bodies in bloodied and torn uniforms, or piling them on top of stretchers. Two seemed to be on guard, facing up the trench toward the German second line. Two of them were patrolling, moving up and down the trench with a third figure between them. Alison blinked the last of her tears away and squinted - whoever it was was tall, with longer hair than the soldiers, tucked under a cap. Field boots tugged on over blue leggings, and a long field coat that might have been white once upon a time. The patrol came closer, and Alison realised with a start just who was marching between the two dead-eyed wrong-skinned soldiers. Nurse Braut stepped between her two escorts and knelt beside Alison, rolling her over onto her back and investigating her coldly.  
  
"So. The latest model. I can't say I'm terribly impressed."  
  
"Your accent's missing," Alison groaned. "Try down the back of the sofa. Your bedside manner's probably down there with it."  
  
Nurse Braut bared her teeth in a manner some distance from a grin. "You've more spine than the last one, anyway. And you've been useful today. I could almost credit the Doctor with having developed some taste. Don't try to sit up, by the way. Your arm's fractured and I suspect you've cracked a rib or two."  
  
"A nurse with standards'd do something about that."  
  
"I'd be offended if I was actually a nurse. And if I thought you weren't just in the middle of a rather primitive reaction to physical pain. Hold still." Not-actually-a-nurse Braut rummaged in her field coat, produced a syringe rather more sophisticated than the ones Alison had caught sight of in Schichtman's improvised hospital - for a start, it was built like a pistol - and drove it into Alison's upper arm. Alison yelped, as might be expected. "And don't do that again. I'd hate to waste the effort of saving your life, but if you compromise my little facade I'm afraid I'll have to kill you. You understand, I'm sure."  
  
The anaesthetic flooded Alison's system with remarkable speed, and she closed her eyes with relief.

* * *

  
The Master was perturbed, or at least in a condition of semi-artificial intelligence that closely approximated perturbation. He had spent a profitless afternoon hunched over a sealed retort in the TARDIS' uppermost chemical laboratory - the only one he'd had the patience to look for - finagling the Doctor's infernal gas and the stuff was still not responding to any sort of analysis. Despairing, he picked the vessel up and gave it a stern shake.  
  
"Perhaps," he said to the retort, more for his own benefit than that of the gas, "you are actively defying analysis. I have no idea. You are, however, frustrating me, and I don't take kindly to that sort of thing."  
  
Naturally, the gas didn't respond. Given all the other things it had failed to respond to, this was not especially surprising. The Master set the retort back down with a sigh and picked up his notes again.  
  
"Silicon based. Almost certainly artificial. Possibly nanotechnological but with no apparent power source, suggesting an approximation of organic functions. Apparently inert and unwilling to respond to electricity, heat, absence of heat, light, absence of light or exposure to radiation. Conclusion? Subject is a pathological nuisance." His hand stalked back across the desk and brushed against the piled equipment. "There's nothing else for it. I shall have to ask his advice."  
  
Picking up the sample, the Master stalked out of the laboratory, down the corridor, up some stairs, along another corridor, down a shorter flight of stairs and around a corner into the console room. He toyed with the remote control on the TARDIS console - to switch off and let the Doctor sort out his own problems, or not to switch off? - but his hand strayed further, to the antiquated and anachronistic-even-by-the-Doctor's-standards telephone crudely wired into the console. The Master sighed once more, mostly for the effect, and dialled the TARDIS mobile number from memory.  
  
Nobody picked up, and with a static hiss, the message service kicked in.  
  
[ _"Hello there. This is the Doctor. I'm afraid I'm busy right now, and if you have this number, you'll probably know why. It might even be your fault. Anyway, leave me a message and I might deign to act upon it at some stage."_ ]  
  
There was a brief crackle, cutting off the Master's own voice asking if it would kill the Doctor to be polite now and again, and then a beep. The Master hissed his own message from behind gritted ceramic teeth.  
  
"Miss Cheney? Message for the Doctor. Tell him his wretched gas is refusing to respond to anything I can throw at it. I'm holding the sample from his detector in my hand as I speak, and..."  
  
To an ordinary, organic eye, the retort's contents were unmoving. The Master, however, was possessed of rather more acute sight than the ordinary, organic observer - for all his jibes at the Doctor's engineering, the Master had to admit he'd done a sensational job - and through his eyes, the interior was abruptly and brilliantly alive with activity. The faint yellowish tint had taken on a darker tone as grey strands wove themselves busily through it, emerging out of the gas they were suspended in and coalescing into tiny microcellular tendrils.  
  
"Never mind. I rather think I've had a breakthrough. What's that vulgar Earth media line - 'more on this as details emerge'?"  
  
The Master hung up. Something about the telephone. He'd tried electricity. What else?  
  
"Radio," he hissed, allowing himself a thin smile. "You're radio-controlled."

* * *

  
Alison came round slowly, blinking to clear the haze from her eyes, and sat up, automatically swinging her legs off the bed she'd been placed on. The floor wasn't co-operating - in fact, it seemed to be actively retreating from her feet as she struggled to plant them on it. She put out her arms to steady herself, but only one moved - the left. Peering muzzily down at her right arm, she saw that it had been set, splinted and bound up in a sling. Upon repeating the exercise with her left, and the rest of her, it became clear that her clothes were absent without leave, and that she was wearing a sort of shift - not exactly comfortable, but warm, and covering everything that needed covering.  
  
The haze was clearing from her eyes - and, rather more slowly, from her head - and she was able to look about the room she was in. It smelled harsh and antiseptic, like a hospital, but it looked like a rather larger and better-built version of the dugouts she'd spent the last two days ducking in and out of, roofed with sheet metal and braced with thick wooden pillars. Someone had even gone to the trouble of covering the floor with gravel, and laying down wooden walkways across that. A dozen gas lamps hung from the ceiling, mostly directed inwards to illuminate a large central table, with another table and a chair beside it.  
  
Leaning further forward, Alison peered into the other bunks around the wall. Most of them were full, but not with people. They mostly held a jumble of wires and dials and springs and what appeared to be about forty disassembled field telephones. One held tools - soldering irons and scalpels and one or two that looked rather out-of-place, with sweeping organic curves and glowing cells set into their workings.  
  
Gravel crunched under jackboots, and two slab-eyed pumpkin-coloured soldiers strode in, flanking a rather cleaner-looking Nurse Braut. She took a long look at Alison, and Alison took a long look at her. High cheekbones in a pointed face. Long blonde hair scraped back into a tight bun. Piercing blue eyes, and she didn't seem to blink very often. Looking Alison up and down as if Alison had been stuck to her shoe and she'd only just noticed.  
  
"Did you do this?" Alison finally asked, indicating her splinted right arm with her left. Braut nodded. "Thanks."  
  
"Don't mention it." Braut turned the chair in the middle of the room around and sat down, facing Alison. "And if anyone asks, it was done at the field hospital, when you were brought in by a stretcher party. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. You understand?"  
  
"Not really." Alison squinted at her. "I mean, I understand what you're saying, I just don't understand why you're saying it."  
  
Nurse Braut sighed. "I take back everything I said about the Doctor's taste. Completely on form after all."  
  
"See, now you're losing me. How do you know the Doctor?"  
  
"He and I are old..." Braut's face twitched, like a cat who's smelt something unpleasant. "Acquaintances. Colleagues, once - although we went by other names in those days."  
  
"So he used to be someone else, and now he's the Doctor. Who does that make you?"  
  
"My subjects used to call me the Rani."

* * *

  
"No, Colonel, I will not just calm down! I don't know what possessed me to let you commandeer her like that in the first place..."  
  
Colonel von Lossberg glowered under his peaked cap. The Doctor had barged into his headquarters in Passendale town hall ten minutes ago and hardly shut up since.  
  
"Doctor, you and your assistant are both attached to the German army, which makes it rather less than 'commandeering'. I needed another pair of hands and you seemed to have them spare. If my informants were doing their work correctly I would have known about the attack on St. Jouen and perhaps been able to position her elsewhere or recall her from duty. Since they are not..." Von Lossberg spread his hands. "I am sorry for your loss."  
  
"Sorry isn't good enough. I've failed her. And I'd been doing so well up until now."  
  
"With what?"  
  
"Does it matter?" The Doctor's hands were shaking, but he steadied himself on von Lossberg's brandy bottle and, since they were there, poured himself a short measure.  
  
"It matters to me, Doctor. It matters to the nation with whom you claim your loyalties lie. It matters to bringing this war to a swift close and preventing the loss of further lives."  
  
The Doctor drained his glass and met von Lossberg's gaze with a scowl of his own. "Your troubles started on the night of the explosion at Messines. Since then, your stretcher parties have brought back no dead soldiers, only wounded. Your supply of mustard gas for the following month disappeared, and some would appear to have been released over your lines last night, when an entire division of your troops apparently deserted en masse. The gas that was released was contaminated with some sort of silicon-based substance which my support staff assure me is being analysed as we speak. Your medical staff, already stretched to the point of collapse, have been plagued with unauthorised absences and unusual cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, and yes, I know that's not what you call it. These last are unusual in that they are triggered not by echoes of the battlefield, but by the trappings of medicine."  
  
"Tell me something I do not know."  
  
"Very well." The Doctor began pacing around Von Lossberg's desk. "I suspect these things are connected. Maybe the mystery substance in the gas is some sort of fear agent, a psychotropic substance that only kicks in when the survivors are brought back... but that wouldn't explain why _your_ survivors are the ones affected. Unless the agent has been used on your own troops already..."  
  
"Speculation. I have to say I am not terribly impressed with your performance thus far," said von Lossberg, flicking through his own notes and tapping a point with an outstretched finger.  
  
"Neither am I," the Doctor snarled. "So far I've only caught up with your investigations in the space of one day, detected a trace of gas none of your instruments could possibly have noticed - oh, and I've managed to lose another young associate, within a week of meeting her this time. Two out of three, I suppose." He poured himself another, larger glass of brandy. "What I could really do with is some intelligence from the British lines concerning the disposition of their casualties - try to work out if there's a correlating pattern on their side."  
  
"I may be able to provide you with that." Von Lossberg curled his own fingers around the brandy bottle and tugged it away from the Doctor's grip. "My intelligence team are based upstairs. If they cannot find what you need, they can send word to their counterparts in the British lines by the usual means. It may take some time - "  
  
"Time you don't have, Colonel." The Doctor's pacings had brought him and von Lossberg face to face, and he glowered down his nose at the German officer. "I have no intention of remaining here... assuming that I am permitted to leave."  
  
"If you attempt to do so, I shall report you to the Chiefs of Staff as being in dereliction of duty."  
  
"Do so. You may receive an unwelcome surprise." The Doctor drained his new glass and made for the door, but it was opened from the other side by a young man wearing the black armband of a dispatch rider. "Come in. The Colonel's free." He swept past the bemused soldier in a swash of cloak and dudgeon, heading down the corridor.  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"I beg your pardon, Colonel?" The young soldier was still peering down the corridor in some perplexity.  
  
"Your message."  
  
"Ah. Yes. Message from supply. They have found the missing mustard gas."  
  
Von Lossberg looked up sharply, and was about to speak, but his mouth had barely opened before he detected the sound of running feet from the corridor outside. There was a brief pause, about long enough for someone to catch their breath, and then the Doctor poked his head back around the door. His eyes were downcast, and his gaze appeared to find the pattern of the carpet fascinating beyond all reason.  
  
"Colonel?"  
  
"Yes, Doctor?"  
  
"This could be the breakthrough I need. I'm prepared to strike a deal with you. I'll take a look at this mustard gas - _if_ you can find Alison."  
  
"If she is alive, my stretcher parties will find and return her."  
  
"And if she's dead?"  
  
"Then whatever has been happening to my casualties will happen to her too." Von Lossberg raised an eyebrow. "It would seem that remaining here and solving my mystery is within your interests, either way."  
  
"Yes, well, least said, soonest mended. Shall we take a look at this gas?"

* * *

  
"Subjects?" Alison said finally.  
  
"Oh, yes. I ran a small planet on the far side of this galaxy. Not much, admittedly, but it had potential. Wasted on the natives, of course, but they shaped up rather nicely under the proper guidance."  
  
Alison scowled. "I've heard that one before."  
  
"I'm sure you have. The difference is that I can say it and mean it. I'm not some barely-more-advanced primitive from the continent next door, burdened by delusions of superiority just because I wear trousers and have a gun. I come from a civilisation that mastered time and space while the other inhabitants of the universe were still having second thoughts about walking on land. The gulf in our accomplishments is demonstrably there." The Rani gave a small, tight smirk. "Still, you will no doubt be delighted to hear that I no longer have a planet to call my own, or indeed much of anything."  
  
"What happened?"  
  
The Rani's face darkened. "War. On a scale hitherto unknown in the universe. I was called home. My people claimed they needed me. I collaborated with them for a while - designed weapons for them, and engineered a species of living ships to fight alongside them. I know a dead loss when I see one, though. Once I'd established the basics and knew their hidebound technicians could finish my work, I left."  
  
"So you're a coward as well as a colonial overlord."  
  
"Make whatever moral judgments you like, young lady. What your unquantifiable standards say about me is your problem, not mine. I'm alive, and if I'd stayed behind I'd be dead."  
  
"How can you think like that?"  
  
"How can you not?" The Rani gave a pained shrug. "I can't help being sensible."  
  
Alison huddled back into her bunk. What was it about the Doctor? Everyone he knew seemed to be wrong in the head in some way. "So, how did you end up here? Doesn't seem like a very superior-being place to hide."  
  
"It wasn't my choice. I kept moving for a long time. I don't know whether it was the strain of constant flight or some external factor, but my ship's systems overloaded as I was travelling, and I materialised under a battlefield." Alison sniggered. "It's not funny."  
  
"It is from where I'm sitting."  
  
"I didn't have to save your life, you know."  
  
"So why did you?"  
  
"You can keep the Doctor off my back."  
  
"I thought you were old 'ominous-pause' acquaintances?"  
  
The Rani's face screwed up into the feline scowl again. "That doesn't mean he's necessarily going to help me. Just call him off and I'll consider your debt repaid."  
  
"Just as a matter of interest," said Alison, putting on her poker face, "what happens if I don't?"  
  
"Well," the Rani said flatly, "you're only useful to me as a bargaining chip with the Doctor. If you're not prepared to do that, you become useless. I don't keep useless things."  
  
Alison leant forward. "What do you do with useless things?"  
  
The Rani copied her gesture, with worrying precision. "I make them into useful ones."

* * *

  
What was most notable about the gas formerly known as 'missing', the Doctor decided, was how much of it there was: or, putting it another way, how unlikely it seemed that anyone could lose the stuff. The gas had been shipped up in live shells - "Very safety-conscious," the Doctor remarked, more to himself than to von Lossberg or any of his associated soldiers and hangers on - and there were rather a lot of them. Enough to fill the former farmhouse where they'd been discovered, more or less from top to bottom.

The Doctor, the Colonel and the soldiers had picked their way in through the front door and been greeted by a ground floor full of the wretched things, neatly stacked in wooden cases.  
  
"And you just... found them?" Von Lossberg looked and sounded quite bewildered. The equally bewildered young man opposite him - Private Jensen - nodded.  
  
"I came straight to you from here, sir."  
  
"Had the building already been searched?"  
  
"Not today. I could find out - " Jensen stepped back as the Doctor threw a plank from a shell case over his shoulder and hauled out the shell, turning it around in his hands.  
  
"I thought so," he said, resting one long finger on the side of the shell. "Definite signs of tampering. The gas canister's been removed and replaced, and... yes, here we are. Marks of a monofilament injector. Little bit before its time, that."  
  
Von Lossberg looked down at the Doctor, tight-lipped. "The gas has been tampered with in some way?"  
  
"Yes, Colonel - tampered with by someone with some very advanced technology at their disposal. I wonder if what happened at Yser mightn't have been a sort of dry run - a small-scale experiment to test the modifications. If I carried money I'd stake it all on there being shells in this shipment with their gas canisters missing altogether."

* * *

  
Alison sat back and sneered. "That what happened to these poor lads?"  
  
"The dead are a resource which this planet, for reasons entirely beyond my comprehension, sees fit to squander. Granted, they're not a particularly easy one to use, but needs must." The Rani waved one bony hand at the soldiers around her, and at the crude machinery piled into the bunks. "You see what I have to work with here. Most of my equipment is in my ship."  
  
"Which you can't get to."  
  
"I had been planning to take my bearings, effect repairs and simply leave, but my arrival had... rather explosive consequences, and before I could get back the other faction involved in this tedious conflict had overrun the crash site."  
  
"Explosive... you landed under the Messines Ridge, didn't you? You caused that mystery explosion Eisner was telling us about!" Alison raised her eyebrows appreciatively. "Can't be much left of your ship if it took out a mountain when it crashed."  
  
"My TARDIS is indestructible. More or less. Trust me, it's intact - just buried under a fortified position and several hundred tons of settling mud. I was planning on waiting for this von Lossberg character to live up to his reputation and advance the front line again so my temporary workforce could extract it in peace."  
  
"And then you'd leave? Shut down the temping agency of the living dead and clear off?"  
  
"I'd been thinking of taking them with me until something more appropriate presented itself, but I could be prevailed upon to leave them behind, if that's what you mean."  
  
"Right." Alison looked at the ground thoughtfully. "You are absolutely mental, but you did patch my arm up and you might have saved my life and you seem pretty reasonable - for an evil genius."  
  
It was the Rani's turn to sneer. "Why, thank you."  
  
"So I'm going to help you. I'll do my best, anyway. The Doctor was sent here, though. He may not be able to leave, even if I can convince him to."  
  
"Sent here?" The Rani looked at her quizzically. "That's... different. And worrying. Do you know who sent him?"  
  
"He never says. Someone who's got his number, anyway. But he doesn't want to be here, so I might be able to talk him round. Just as long as you leave as soon as you can."  
  
"I have no particular attachment to Earth - that's the Doctor's speciality. Agreed." She spoke rather more quickly now, and seemed more animated - not exactly nervous, but certainly needing to move faster. Afraid of something? "Just be sure you make him go."  
  
"Okay. Take me back to him. And I'll need my clothes back."  
  
The Rani stood up and crossed the gravel floor with a crunch, making for one of the empty bunks. Alison's clothes had been left to dry out and neatly, almost pedantically folded - the mud had dried to a cracking crust, but at least they weren't wet any more. The Rani dropped them on the bed, waited a few seconds, and began to tap her foot irritably. Alison looked up pointedly and coughed. The Rani sighed and turned her back. "You do realise I'm the one who removed those in the first place?"  
  
"Rather you than Private Pumpkinhead over there," replied Alison, squirming about and attempting to do up her trousers one-handed, and thinking dark thoughts about giving up on the top. "Right. Where to?"  
  
"We're in an abandoned communication trench. I keep the most human-looking of my men standing about looking like a garrison and nobody seems to ask too many questions. Out the door, turn right and you'll be heading back toward the new front line."  
  
"You'd better come with me."  
  
"I have work to do."  
  
"You'll need to get me into the hospital for your cover story to work. There'll be forms and things. And I think Shichtman wants to give you a telling off."  
  
The Rani turned around on her heel. "Fine. But not a _word_ of this to the Doctor, understand?"  
  
Alison gave up on the top. "Not a word."

* * *

  
"Doctor, I cannot accept one word of this!" Von Lossberg paced up and down outside the house, kicking up small plumes of mud. The Doctor was sitting on the front porch, out of the rain, and examining the glass canister containing the mustard gas.  
  
"Which word are you having trouble with?" he asked offhandedly, turning the cylinder over in his hands and drumming thoughtfully on the bottom. Von Lossberg sighed and slapped his forehead.  
  
"This... this fairy story of gas interference! And your mysterious and painstaking 'team' that I have yet to see!"  
  
The Doctor's lips moved silently - either he was calculating something under his breath, or testing a remark for mammoth insensitivity. Finally he looked up at Von Lossberg and blinked owlishly at him. "You have your precious gas back. I may not have been the one to find it, but it's more than you had this morning. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?"  
  
"I do." Von Lossberg ceased his pacing and stood, his boots sinking into the small house's front yard, already forming a small puddle as the rain intensified. "A gas attack on the Yser Canal. We _must_ regain those positions and now we have the resources to do so."  
  
This time the Doctor's upward glance was faster, and had more of the hawk than the owl about it. "I don't advise that, Colonel. I still don't know what else this stuff does."  
  
Von Lossberg snorted. "It is mustard gas. You and your machine said as much to me this morning. It will do what it was designed to do, and that is what is important!"  
  
The Doctor lurched upright and stalked out to face him, clutching the canister under his cloak. "That, Colonel, may well be what lost you the Yser positions in the first place!"  
  
"Then it will do as much for the British!"  
  
The two men held each others' gaze for a long moment, rain pattering down on von Lossberg's cap and the Doctor's already flattened hair. The Doctor scowled and stalked past him, unspeaking. Von Lossberg turned and strode after him, mud squelching underfoot. "Where are you going?"  
  
"To the field hospital. Your instruments may not be up to analysing this stuff but I might be able to counteract it somehow, or at least filter out the contaminant. You'd better hope I can manage it before you start firing this stuff at the British."  
  
"Concerned for the well-being of your former countrymen?"  
  
"Concerned for the well-being of you all."

* * *

  
It was something of an unhappy accident, in the end. The Doctor and the Colonel were coming down the road, their argument drawing wary looks and more than a little speculation from the soldiers ranged along the streets of Passendale. Alison and the Rani were coming up the road, midway through a rather one-sided conversation in which the Rani outlined variations on a detailed cover story that should have an answer to every question Alison might be asked if only she could stretch her limited faculties and remember them all. None of them were looking where they were going.  
  
"'Scuse m - Doctor!"  
  
"Pardon me - "  
  
"Damn!"  
  
"Terribly - Alison!" The Doctor beamed, his eyes widening and his thin face peeling into a smile. "Been in the wars? Who's your... friend..." The beam was gone. The eyes were narrowing. The lips were tightening into their customary grim line. The Rani looked left and right, avoiding the grey glare, and finally gave up, meeting it head on with a tight, bright smile in which good humour was notable only for its absence.  
  
"Hello, Doctor."


	4. Chapter 4

The Doctor took a long, deep breath and glowered down at her.  
  
“Long time no see,” he said. “Not since - ”  
  
“Indeed.” The Rani's eyes didn't so much as flicker. Von Lossberg's did — they darted from the nurse to the spy and back again and finally adopted a squint of bemusement.  
  
“You are friends?”  
  
“Old acquaintances,” said the Doctor, still not smiling. “We were at school together.”  
  
“You went to school in Germany? Or you in England?”  
  
“Medical school,” said the Rani, glowering at the Doctor.  
  
“In a little place I guarantee you've never heard of,” added the Doctor. “Haven't seen each other for years.”  
  
“You must have a great deal to discuss,” said von Lossberg, tapping one hand on the elbow resting in it.  
  
“I'm sure we do. Perhaps while I'm working on your problem.”  
  
“You believe Nurse Braut may be able to help you?”  
  
“I'd go so far as to say I suspect it,” said the Doctor, lips finally spreading into a smile. “If she is prepared to co-operate, of course.”  
  
“She is entirely prepared to co-operate,” said the Rani in brittle tones, forcing a slight smile of her own. “I would be happy to assist the Doctor in anything that does not compromise my own work.”  
  
“Heaven forbid that I should ask you to.”  
  
“Quite.” Von Lossberg's expression settled back into determined lines. “I will give you until dawn, Doctor, and only until dawn. If you can identify nothing wrong with my mustard gas by then, it will be used in the next bombardment.”  
  
“Oh, I think I'll have something for you by dawn, Colonel, don't worry about that.” The Doctor beamed at von Lossberg's retreating back as he turned sharply and strode away up the street, in the direction Alison and the Rani had come. “Assuming the person undoubtedly responsible sees fit to follow through on her promise.”  
  
The Rani glared at him. “I can explain.”  
  
“I'm sure you can.”  
  
“Consider in your calculations that I have saved your young compatriot's life.”  
  
“Really?” The Doctor turned back to Alison, and repeated his enquiry in a slightly less incredulous tone.  
  
“She really did. Sorry. Thanks for not blowing her cover.”  
  
“I wouldn't thank me yet.” He looked from Alison to the Rani and back again. “Inside, both of you. You first,” he added, pointing at the Rani.  
  
“Don't you trust me, Doctor?”  
  
“On balance, and giving all due consideration? No.” The Rani sighed and walked up the path to the field hospital, boots crunching on the gravelly mud. The Doctor looked down at Alison, and whispered as they followed. “So what happened?”  
  
“A trench fell on me,” replied Alison, with mock gravity. “And then the Rani found me. Dug me out and splinted up my arm.”  
  
“Not her usual response to strangers. What would possess her to do a thing like that?”  
  
Alison stopped outside the hospital porch, a short distance from the guards, and looked up at him, weighing the value of deceit, lips taut and gaze fidgeting around his face. “Maybe she's had a change of heart?” she said, after a long moment.  
  
“She'd have to remember where she'd left them.” The Doctor's eyes narrowed further as he led her indoors, keeping the Rani in sight. “I find it far more likely that she wants my help with something and refrained from killing you to keep me on-side. It's the sort of thing her mercenary mind would come up with.”  
  
“I'm not sure she wants your help...”  
  
“She's not getting it,” the Doctor snapped. “The woman's a monster. Even if she has done you a good turn, I guarantee she wants something in return. It's probably nefarious at best and diabolical at worst.”  
  
“She sounds a bit like the Master.”  
  
“They're more similar than either would ever admit, small matters like competence and relative ambition notwithstanding. I should probably let the old reprobate know she's about.”  
  
“Thinking of setting them up?”  
  
“Not even in jest,” said the Doctor, smirking slightly. “Although there was a time when - ”  
  
“Here,” said Alison, holding out the TARDIS mobile. “You can save the anecdotes for later. I'm going to keep an eye on her.”  
  
The Doctor took the 'phone from her. “Be careful. She's saved your life once, but only because she wants you for something. The second you're more use to her dead than alive...”  
  
“Like you said, she wants to keep you on-side. I think we have an understanding.”  
  
Alison followed the Rani, and the Doctor's gaze followed Alison. He harrumphed, looked down at the device in his hand, squinted at it in bemusement for a moment, and recalled the message that had evidently been loitering therein for some time. His face darkened, and he pressed the Return Call key with considerable discontent. It took several rings for the Master to answer.  
  
“It's me,” said the Doctor, cutting the Master off at the opening 'ahh'. “Listen, I've something important to - ”  
  
“Nanites,” the Master purred.  
  
“Same to you. What are you talking about?”  
  
“The mystery agent in your mustard gas. Primitive nanites, responding to shortwave radio, and they seem designed to take in, modulate and release an electric current, skimming a little power off for themselves. Of course, I haven't the faintest idea what for, but - ”  
  
“I imagine you'll work it out when I tell you who made them.”  
  
“Oh?” The Master sounded slightly put out. The Doctor wondered, in passing, whether the nanite-hunt had taken him long. Then he took a deep breath.  
  
“It's the Rani.”  
  
“She survived?”  
  
“Somehow.”  
  
“Does she know?”  
  
“I'm not sure.”  
  
“What are we going to do with her?”  
  
“I'm not sure about that either. Just be ready to move the TARDIS over here. We may need to leave in something of a hurry.”  
  
“A pity. I was having such a nice time.”  
  
The Doctor smiled. “I'm sure. Are you going to have a problem with - ”  
  
“Are you?”  
  
“Perhaps. Just be ready to collect us. Listen for the recall signal.” The Doctor hung up, and walked into Room 3B.

* * *

“So,” he said, beaming with uncharacteristic width. “Nanites in the mustard gas.”  
  
“You know?” said Alison and the Rani together, though Alison spoke with considerably more relief. “Thank God for that,” she continued, hopping off her stool and crossing to stand by the Doctor. “Doctor, she's got zombies out there.”  
  
“Traitor,” said the Rani, and scowled. “And please don't use the zed-word.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“It's ridiculous, that's why. It sounds so terribly... occult.”  
  
“Reanimating the dead?” The Doctor sighed. “Well, you score ten out of ten for use of resources. Working remote neuron control with early twentieth century technology and whatever you had in your pockets at the time: I'm almost impressed.”  
  
The Rani raised an eyebrow and shifted her weight about on her stool. “You know, I'm sure you used to be more sentimental than this.”  
  
“Oh, believe me, I'm appalled. Outraged, in fact. But I haven't the energy to be properly angry with you, so we might as well skip the tedious moral diatribes and get straight to the part where you tell me why.”  
  
“I needed a workforce to unearth my TARDIS.”  
  
“And that was the best idea you could come up with? You didn't think to just ask for a few good men with shovels?”  
  
The Rani emitted a weary sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don't know if it's escaped your attention, Doctor, but I am in point of fact a woman.”  
  
“What's that got to do with anything?”  
  
Alison boggled at him. “Oh my God. I cannot believe you just said that.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Doctor, it's 1917. She's a woman. I... God, I can't even begin to explain what an idiot you're being.”  
  
“I have to commend you, Doctor,” said the Rani, smirking. “You've actually managed to adopt someone intelligent for a change. Alison has it absolutely right. When I approached the previous commander-in-chief he all but patted me on the head and told me to come back when I'd grown up.”  
  
The Doctor frowned. “I see. I don't suppose this had anything to do with his sudden withdrawal?”  
  
“No!” The Rani looked almost as put as the Doctor did. “Actually, I had nothing to do with that. Unless you count the exploding hill and subsequent retreat, which I suppose was technically my fault.”  
  
“You blew up a hill?”  
  
“I gathered it was one that was meant to have exploded anyway. I certainly haven't sensed history coming unravelled yet. Have you?”  
  
“Not yet, but you can hardly pretend you've been trying to keep it that way.” The Doctor began pacing about in front of the room's blackboard. “We have to get you out of here before your luck runs out.”  
  
“You're proposing to help me?”  
  
The Doctor gave her a long look, the thousand-yard-stare he always did when he was contemplating something dreadful. “I'm proposing to get you out of Earth's history before you do some serious damage.”  
  
“What about extracting my TARDIS? Can't you exert some of that marvellous local influence you always seem to possess?”  
  
“Absolutely not. The excavation would be too significant an event — it would change too much. Anyway, I can't allow you to go roaming about the universe unsupervised.” Ignoring the Rani's expression of mounting incredulity, and Alison's of increasing concern, the Doctor continued. “My TARDIS is parked out in no-man's-land; we'll pop back out there before the gas attack tomorrow and clear off quietly.”  
  
The Rani glowered at him for a long, silent moment, stood up from her stool and half-turned away, toward the door. Then, in a voice redolent with uncharacteristic panic, she shouted “SPIES!” down the stairwell.

The Doctor looked around the room, flabberghasted, and Alison gawped at her.

“What?”  
  
“Tactical necessity, Alison. You probably don't deserve it. You, on the other hand,” she said, glaring at the Doctor, her voice almost lost in the tramp of boots from downstairs, “most assuredly do.”  
  
“Traitor,” said the Doctor flatly as two soldiers burst in, rifles raised. Shichtman was trailing them, quite heavily out of breath.  
  
“Doctor Shichtman,” said the Rani, ignoring him. “This man is not a defector and has never even met the Chiefs of Staff — he is a long-standing associate of the British government, a member of their Intelligence Task Force and a notorious double agent. Ask Colonel von Lossberg — he has been trying to dissuade the Colonel from tomorrow's bombardment with some outrageous story about contaminated mustard gas.”  
  
“Shichtman, you can't possibly believe her. You've told me yourself how suspiciously this woman's been acting, her mysterious absences, chronic neglect. I was about to arrest her myself!”  
  
“Nurse Braut?”  
  
“Of course I have been absenting myself, Doctor Shichtman. I work for Department Three-B of the General Staff. European military intelligence.”  
  
“You made that up!” the Doctor snapped. “You read that off the room number.”  
  
“Actually,” said one of the soldiers standing behind Shichtman, smirking at Alison in open recognition, “she is right. Before the war I did guard duty at the War Academy in Berlin.” Alison rolled her eyes. The arse from the hospital. What was that about people's luck running out?  
  
Shichtman looked from the Doctor to the Rani and back again. “I am still not sure I believe this. Are there really women working in military intelligence?”  
  
“Oh, come off it,” said Alison, more or less automatically. “Haven't you heard of Mata Hari?”  
  
“Alison! You're not helping!”  
  
“I'm not sorry.”  
  
Schichtman looked at the two soldiers behind him. “This is beyond me. We should take them to the Colonel. You too, Nurse Braut, please.”  
  
“Absolutely,” said the Rani as she straightened out her coat. “I wouldn't miss this for the world.”

* * *

  
The interview with von Lossberg was even more excruciating than Alison had been expecting. The Colonel had been half asleep, and half focused on drawing up bombardment plans for the morning; in the end, he had ordered both of them confined to a spare room in the town hall and placed under armed guard until he could muster the time and patience to deal with them. It was a very small room — in fact, it had a distinctly cupboardish feel about it, being about twenty feet long with no furniture but a desk and about half a dozen shelves on one wall, laden with files and journals, all of which were both in French and extraordinarily tedious. Alison was flicking through them nevertheless — it was better than watching the Doctor pace up and down, fuming.  
  
“Locked in a filing cabinet on the say-so of an amoral, twisted... ooh. And you weren't helping.”  
  
“Don't blame me for this one, mate. I've been staying out of his way like you told me to, so if he's still mad with us it's your fault.” Alison licked a finger and turned a page, in pretty much exactly the same way the Master usually did, and the look on the Doctor's face indicated that he'd noticed.  
  
“What do you mean it's my fault? I could hardly have told him the truth.”  
  
“No, but you could have done something other than rip his map up, call him an immeasurable buffoon and order him to call off the bombardment.” Seeing the Doctor's frown, Alison shrugged. “I'm just saying you didn't exactly make yourself look like a loyal supporter of the German cause.”  
  
“Whereas you and your badge from the Mata Hari fan club are, of course, good and faithful servants?”  
  
“Reflex action, all right? I said I was sorry.”  
  
“No, you said you weren't sorry.”  
  
“Slip of the tongue.” Alison licked her fingers and turned another page.  
  
“I wish you wouldn't do that. Filthy habit. What's in the book, anyway?”  
  
“Parish records. Riveting stuff. Almost wish you'd turn the translator off, but then I'd have to — what are you looking at me like that for?”  
  
The Doctor stopped his pacing, lurched across the room and whispered into Alison's ear at disturbingly close range. “Turn off the translator! Alison, you're brilliant!”  
  
“Well, yeah, but a few specifics would be nice,” Alison whispered back.  
  
“The Master's expecting a recall signal. All I have to do is press a button,” and at this, the Doctor's hand disappeared into his pocket, from which there came a muffled beep, “and he'll be along to pick us up.”  
“Doctor.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I've heard the noise the TARDIS makes when it lands. What, exactly, is going to stop them from hearing that, barging in, and shooting us before it's even properly landed?”  
  
“Ah.”  
  
“Plus I'm not sure it'll even fit in here.”  
  
“Ah-ha.”  
  
“Apart from that, though, great plan.”

* * *

  
Colonel von Lossberg felt like crying. An entire battalion deserting, a missing shipment of gas showing up almost complete, and that lunatic from the General Staff revealed as a double agent, and it wasn't even dinner-time. He looked down at his map — at the four pieces of paper placed corner to corner that now constituted his map — and sighed. At least the mathematics of bombardment could be relied upon. Someone coughed, and he looked up sharply.  
  
The woman from Department Three-B — Braut, Shichtman had called her, although he had more than a sneaking suspicion that that was a code-name — was still there, standing behind a chair opposite his desk, and giving either it or him a long, appraising look. He couldn't quite tell - his eyes were watering.  
  
“I do not wish to be rude, Miss Braut, but... what do you want? I have had something of a tiring day.”  
  
“Of course you have. Several, by all appearances.” She looked up, and this time her stare was definitely directed at him — practically through him. Striking looking woman, he had to admit; there was something about her eyes, something cold and piercing and yet faintly sad. She nodded, finally, and rested her hands on the back of the chair. “Command is wearying; I have seen the effects of it before.”  
  
“Among my fellow Chiefs of Staff, I presume.”  
  
“And high officers elsewhere. It has been a long war.”  
  
“It may soon be over. The British cannot hold their recent gains — not now I finally have the resources to bombard them off the Messines Ridge, at least. Perhaps by autumn...”  
  
“What would you say, Colonel, if I told you you could end the war within the week?”  
  
Von Lossberg looked up sharply. “At first, I would ask if you were mad. Then I would ask how. And then, Miss Braut, were there fewer years between us, I would in all likelihood ask you to marry me.”  
  
“Were there fewer years between us.”  
  
“I am sixty-one years old. This war is likely to be my last.”  
  
Her head cocked slightly, and she crooked a little smile at him. “All the more reason to end it soon, then.”  
  
Von Lossberg looked down at his map, and then up again. “Are you mad, then?” She simply raised an eyebrow, and stretched her smile slightly wider. “How do you plan to enact this miracle?”  
  
“All you have to do is continue with the bombardment as planned. Concentrate the gas on the Messines Ridge, on the new positions. Cover as much ground as possible. None of your men need make an assault.”  
  
“Is that it?”  
  
“That is it. Trust me. This is not merely a matter of inflicting casualties, although they will be heavy. Bombard Messines tomorrow, and within two days you will possess a strategic advantage of a kind this world has never seen before.”  
  
Von Lossberg sighed. “You are mad.”  
  
She straightened up and folded her arms. “I am possessed of certain... intelligence concerning this sphere of operations, and the additional effects of the new mustard gas.”  
  
“Oh, not you as well.” Von Lossberg pushed back his chair, and stood up. “Miss Braut, I must confess I had higher hopes than - ”  
  
“Why do you think the Doctor is even here? He knows, Colonel. He knows, as I know, what will happen if that gas contacts the British positions. It will turn the tide of the war, without a single German casualty as long as your men are careful. He knows and he is trying to prolong the war regardless.” She stepped around the table, halting in front of von Lossberg, blocking his path to the door. “These additional effects have already occurred. At Yser. There was an accidental release of the gas.”  
  
“What does the stuff do, make men disappear?”  
  
Her smile was terrifying — not least because it was more genuine now than it had been all evening. “Nothing so crude.” Her gaze focused on his. “Trust me, Colonel. The capacity to end the war. Yours, within three days. And all you have to do is something you had every intention of doing anyway, and leave the matter of taking the position to me.”  
  
Von Lossberg met her stare with his own. “As you say, I had planned the bombardment anyway. So be it. Work your miracle.”  
  
She chuckled, saluted, and made for the door, stopping just before turning the handle. “By the way, I prefer rubies.”  
  
Von Lossberg's face wrinkled for a moment, and then realisation dawned, and he smiled as she left.

* * *

  
As time went on, the Doctor was increasingly perturbed. Alison could tell by the way he'd stopped pacing and started fiddling with the TARDIS mobile as quietly as he possibly could, occasionally giving a wary glance towards the door.  
  
“I still don't understand why you don't just do something fancy to the lock and get us out of here,” Alison whispered sharply.  
  
“Where on Earth would we go? We're in the middle of the German field headquarters and the Colonel is talking about having me shot — what's so funny?”  
  
“You sound like René Artois. Any minute now you'll be waggling your eyebrows and going on about your knockwursts.”  
  
“If you don't start helping, I'm taking the Master and running away to Switzerland.”  
  
“Chance'd be a fine thing. What are you actually doing?”  
  
“Text message. He isn't replying.”  
  
“You've not done anything to upset him, have you?”  
  
“Nothing I don't do every day.”  
  
“We're dead.”  
  
A bolt shot back, and the door was opened. Alison looked up, standing in front of the Doctor while he slippped the TARDIS mobile into his pocket, and was dismayed to see a distinctly armed-and-dangerous silhouette in the doorway.  
  
“The Colonel has decided to have you shot.”  
  
“Oh 'eck,” said the Doctor flatly. Alison barked with laughter. The German private in the doorway just looked confused.

* * *

  
The Rani strode into her improvised bunker with more than a hint of triumph about her, flinging her trenchcoat onto the empty operating table and shaking out her hair as she crossed the floor. Her soldiers stood right where she'd left them — only the ones on the surface moved, having standard orders to patrol up and down, circulate among themselves, and salute anyone passing by on principle. She'd have to change the guards on the end of the trench again; they were starting to bulge out of their gas masks, and she'd picked up a distinctly phlegmy smell about them. Still, in three days they'd be von Lossberg's problem, and the human could either let them rot or invest in the early invention of the aerosol deodorant. His notes had said the bombardment was due to start at six... with a little luck, he'd have picked up on her hints about the Doctor and decided to put his mind at ease before the attack went in.  
  
She stopped, for a moment, her hands hovering over the controls. It seemed somewhat wasteful, really. The Doctor's continued survival indicated a chain of events worth understanding in more detail. Perhaps she'd come back after he regenerated — if he regenerated — and extract the data. Perhaps not. Too many amorous Germans to avoid.  
  
The Rani began adjusting controls, turning field telephone dials and adjusting components — a wire rewound here, an improvised battery reconnected there, a vitally important spoon aligned correctly over there. An undignified sort of arrangement, this, more worthy of the Doctor than of a truly competent scientist, but it only had to suffice for a while longer. Perhaps it would work long enough for von Lossberg to win his war, or perhaps it would burn out the second she left.  
  
After a minute or so's consideration while her hands did the work almost automatically, the Rani decided she didn't particularly care.

* * *

  
Dawn was just peeping through the eastern skies over Passendale, casting long shadows as the Doctor and Alison were marched out into the town square. Von Lossberg was nowhere to be seen. The Doctor scowled at this thought.  
  
“Anyone would think he had better things to do than attend my execution. It's a positive outrage.”  
  
“Could be worse,” Alison muttered, not looking at him. “At least it's stopped raining.”  
  
The Doctor glowered at the sky. “You British. We're about to be shot and you're still talking about the weather. Those would be absolutely terrible last words.”  
  
“Had a lot of experience at coming up with yours, then, have you?”  
  
“More than you will ever know. Unfortunately.”  
  
They reached the house opposite the town hall. A jagged line of bullet marks, wavering between five and six feet off the ground, confirmed that this was the proverbial 'it', almost as solid an indication as the line of eight German soldiers standing at ease, rifles in hand, about ten yards away in the middle of the street. One of them had the decency to look embarrassed.  
  
“Corporal Eisner. Under other circumstances it would be delightful to see you again. Unfortunately, it turns out I'm a spy. I was as surprised as anyone, of course.”  
  
“God, Doctor! Must you make this any more difficult for me?”  
  
“It's not exactly a breeze for us, mate,” Alison snapped. “I didn't exactly plan on dying like this.”  
  
“Neither did I.” The Doctor looked the wall up and down. “This is decidedly ignominious. Hardly becoming my dignity at all.”  
  
“Just line up there, in front of the wall. Face towards or away. Your look-out,” said another soldier in the firing squad.  
  
“Oh, Christ, you again,” said Alison. “Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry?”  
  
“Not really.”  
  
They fell into line against the wall. The Doctor turned to face the firing squad, supercilious expression installed, eyebrow raised — Alison adopted for the 'face the wall with fingers in ears' approach, gritting her teeth and thinking hard of things to have no regrets about.  
  
The soldiers raised their guns. Off in the distance, fingers or no fingers, she could hear the whistle of shells.  
  
The air was rent with a wheezing, groaning sound, rather like someone doing unspeakable things to a piano wire. A cold wind blew up from nowhere, stirring the pools of stagnant water by the side of the road, and a flashing blue-white light set several German soldiers to covering their eyes, Eisner among them. When he opened them again, the prisoners were gone, and in their place stood an incongruous blue box, with little glass windows and a pointed roof.  
Alison opened one eye, and then the other, and then took her fingers out of her ears.  
  
“'Come on, Dover, move your blooming arse?'” the Master growled from somewhere not too far away. Alison spun on the spot, grabbed the first thing she could find that wasn't actually part of the console — it looked a little bit like one of the Doctor's usual shoes — and flung it at him.  
  
“Where the bloody hell have you been?”


End file.
